Time, Quality, Scope — Choose Any Two, But Which Two?

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Time, Quality, Scope — Choose Any Two, But Which Two?

Prioritization is a balancing act. Those who can do it effectively are some of the most productive people I know.

Reflecting on Q3, I found myself thinking about the expression, choose any two: time, quality, scope — and how it related to prioritization.

When costs are fixed, the remaining variables that can be manipulated are time, quality and scope.

This is a variation on the Iron Triangle, sometimes called the Project Management Triangle, where the three variables are time, scope and cost, with quality in the unchanging middle.

No matter what triangle you adhere to, choose any two reminds us that you can’t do it all. You have to pick something to sacrifice.

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9 Steps to Building an Agile Marketing Culture

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9 Steps to Building an Agile Marketing Culture

In the age of social media, consumers expect and enjoy the immediacy of information and content on the web. Marketers, to remain relevant, have found they have to keep up. That's why in the past couple of years, I've seen so many companies shift toward agile marketing.

Some companies embrace the agile marketing methodology from the onset. But it seems just as common for brands to test the waters before jumping in.

Whatever you commitment to agility is, to be wholly successful with agile marketing I believe you need more that just a change in strategy. You need a shift in culture as well.

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Agile Marketing Methodology Overview

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Agile Marketing Methodology Overview

Agile marketing is an adaptive marketing methodology that focuses on taking small steps, learning quickly, and being ready for change.

Teams work in short, incremental work cycles, allowing agile marketers to rapidly adapt their stories and messages to ensure market relevance. Decision-making is data-driven, providing a frequent feedback loop to help recalibrate...

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They Weren’t Mistakes If You Learned From Them

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Source: Miss Pupik (Flickr)Ever have a bad idea? In marketing, that’s pretty much an occupational hazard.

Maybe that’s why I sometimes hear stories of campaigns that perform just terribly. Every so often I’m the one telling those stories.

But if we listen and learn, every failed campaign should lead us closer to success. Of course, it’s always preferable to fail fast, or better yet, not fail at all.

That’s why watching campaigns launch in real-time is so effective. It shortens the feedback loop, creating more opportunities to learn and optimize, or pull the plug. Real-time monitoring also let’s you know if you’ve struck gold and it’s time to ramp up your campaign and bet big while it's hot.

I hear these stories too, of agile marketers with their real-time data. When a campaign isn’t going well, they go on a hunt for a solution. A content change here. A new message there.

And by introducing optimization early and often, agile marketers might double, triple, even decuple (x10 — I had to look that up) the results of their efforts. Or maybe they terminate the project early to save budget for better ideas.

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New eBook: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO AGILE MARKETING IN DISPLAY ADS

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We're excited to share our new eBook called THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO AGILE MARKETING IN DISPLAY ADS. In this 15-page eBook, we review everything you need to know to use agile marketing to power your display advertising.

Topics covered:

  • Benefits of agile marketing
  • Potential pitfalls for agile marketers
  • How an agile approach helps overcome banner blindness
  • Best practices for what makes a good display ad
  • Real examples of agile display advertising by startups and Fortune 500 companies

Download the eBook here.

Where Good Ideas Come From

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My full name is Robert Pauling Sawasky Bailey Lennon. My nerdy parents named me after dual Nobel-Prize recipient and great mind Linus Pauling, among others.

I noticed this morning that my namesake believed in the value of Agile long before it even existed:

Our first instinct is to see the highest point as the most positive place on the graph, but statistics tell us a different story--that our best ideas are going to be in that little range at the end.

With so many sub-par ideas to get through, the Bell Curve makes a great argument for a fail fast, agile method for innovation, whether it be in marketing or software development.

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Countdown to Agile: 5 Ways to Prepare Your Team for Agile Display Advertising

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Having a solid strategy is crucial if you’re going to optimize your ads while they are in market. Through smart planning, lose the fear of changing your ads mid-run. 

Here are a few tips:

  1. Identify goals, key metrics, and possible changes before the campaign goes live. Outline specific and strategic actions, but leave some room for flexibility.
  2. Ask for a buy-in from your team, so that changes to the creative, content or ad functionality are known about, and if possible, pre-approved. Then, if you identify opportunities for optimization or experimentation, you can have an action plan already in place, and streamline the process of making or reverting changes to the creative.
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Surprise, things don't always go as planned

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Last week, McDonalds had a Twitter campaign to spread awareness about their supplier relationships with farmers.  The #McDstories hashtag went askew when people started tweeting about not-so-positive experiences with the fast-food chain, including stories of food poisoning and chipped molars.

This is a great example of why it's important to act quickly in today's marketing environment and why brand marketers must be agile.  Luckily, McDonalds had a pulse of the Twittersphere and was able to quickly pull hashtag before further damage was done.  

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